I bought these train tracks at IKEA a while back, and then later thought about doing some sort of train table. Carter loves train tables when he gets a chance to play on them, but they take up so much space and you can't exactly put them away easily. So I never did get one, and I'm actually really glad now. When Carter wants to play with his trains, he gets the tracks out of the bin and starts trying to put them together. It's cute to watch him do this! Eventually I help and we build some sort of loop.
When he's done we can put them away and have plenty of space to play with other things. I also discovered this morning that the Thomas brand trains made for wooden tracks fit on the IKEA tracks, yay! That's awesome because Carter is really getting into Thomas now.
He's totally obsessed with anything related to the alphabet now. He loves the ABC song, and there are tons of videos on YouTube of the ABC song. This one with Elmo is his current favorite. He will literally watch it for 20 minutes, over and over. Every time it ends, he says, "Again! More ABC song!"
He has alphabet books, alphabet puzzles, alphabet blocks, alphabet magnets, and alphabet bath stickers. He is totally obsessed! It's pretty awesome. :-)
Today was a gorgeous day, just perfect. It's sunny and mid-60s, and it was a wonderful day to spend some time outside. We decided to go to Champion Park in Cedar Park (the town just to the north of us) this afternoon. It was a park we haven't been to before, and the pictures I'd seen of it online looked like fun. It's on the Williamson County walking trail, which is a beautiful hiking trail that follows a creek and winds along the side of a lake. The play areas in this park are cool and really unusual. There's a rock climbing area:
And a huge sand pit with dinosaur "fossils" buried in the sand and lots of digging toys:
Oddly enough, Carter was completely uninterested in the sand today. Instead, he wanted to run around in the open space.
We walked around the park's walking trail, and he loved it!
Here he's checking out some deer tracks we found. When I pointed them out and said they were tracks, he immediately dropped to his knees and started crawling along the tracks, saying, "Follow the tracks!" He got that from an episode of Nio Hao, Kai-Lan. Who says TV isn't educational? ;-)
After a loop around the park he slowed down and seemed to be getting tired, so we decided to head for home. On the way we stopped at the McDonald's in Avery Ranch (a subdivision in Cedar Park) for ice cream, and OMG: that is seriously the nicest McDonald's I've ever seen! The inside was gorgeous, with a fireplace and water features and cushy chairs. It's one of the ones that's trying to be a coffee shop, and wow, it was really inviting. The playground on the outside was probably the coolest McDonald's playground I've seen.
It had an African safari theme, which is awesome on its own, but it was also toddler-friendly!
This is now my favorite McDonald's! Here Carter is enjoying some ice cream:
It was a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon. This is what I love about living in a warm place: We go right from fall to spring! People always say, "Don't you miss having seasons?" We have seasons here. Just not the ones that suck. ;-)
He's taking a really late nap right now. Our sleep schedule is all off after our travels, heh. He's been going to bed around 11:30 and getting up between 9:30 and 10:00, so he naps from 4:00-6:00. Now that I have to start getting up early a couple of days a week it'll get adjusted back to something more normal. It's actually been fun to stay up late and sleep late with him, though. He always sleeps 10 hours, regardless of when he goes to sleep, and then naps about 6 hours after he gets up for 2-3 hours. For a kid with no set schedule, he's very predictable!
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